Florida Phosphate Mining History

Phosphate mining began in Florida in 1883 near Hawthorne in Alachua County, after a U.S. Army Corps of Engineers surveyor found phosphate along the Peace River in 1881.

The Southwest Florida Water Management District credits Captain J. Francis LeBaron with the 1881 find, made while surveying the Peace River south of Fort Meade, and dates further deposits to 1886, when John C. Jones and Captain W.R. McKee formed a company and began mining (SWFWMD, The Discovery of Phosphate). Within a decade more than 200 companies were mining in central Florida, and Peace River land that had sold for $1.25 an acre reached $300. Work started with picks and shovels and moved to steam shovels as deeper reserves were found; the many fossils in the deposits gave the region its name, Bone Valley.

The Florida Department of Environmental Protection separates two early branches (FDEP Phosphate page). Hard-rock phosphate came from a belt running from Alachua to Citrus counties starting in 1883, while pebble phosphate mining began in central Florida in 1888 and reached Hamilton County in North Florida in the 1960s.

Florida phosphate mining now takes place mainly in Polk, Hillsborough, Manatee and Hardee counties, inside a roughly 1.3 million acre region known as the Bone Valley, plus one mine in Hamilton County.

FDEP counts 28 phosphate mines covering more than 450,000 acres (FDEP Phosphate page). Eleven are active, ten are fully reclaimed and released from their obligations, and the rest are either not started or shut down. A single mine ranges from about 5,000 to 100,000 acres, and mining disturbs 3,000 to 6,000 acres a year, of which roughly 25 to 30 percent are wetlands or other surface waters.

The state and federal counts differ. The U.S. Geological Survey reports phosphate rock mined by five companies at 10 mines across four states in 2025, Florida, Idaho, North Carolina and Utah (USGS Mineral Commodity Summaries 2026), while FDEP lists 11 active mines in Florida alone.

For a property owner, the practical question is often whether a lot was ever mined. FDEP offers a mapping tool for that and cautions that mining after the 1940s is generally well documented in central Florida and Hamilton County, records from 1975 on are more reliable, and earlier mining may not appear at all (FDEP Phosphate page).

Florida phosphate is dug with draglines, washed into a slurry, separated from sand and clay at a beneficiation plant, and shipped by rail to separate chemical plants that process it for fertilizer and other products.

FDEP describes the sequence (FDEP Phosphate page): dragline buckets of 45 to 65 cubic yards strip 15 to 30 feet of overburden, then dig out the matrix, about equal parts phosphate rock, clay and sand. High-pressure water guns turn the matrix into slurry that is pumped to a beneficiation plant, which can be several miles away. The clay goes by pipeline to clay settling areas, where it stays, and the sand is pumped back to the mine for reclamation. Chemical processing happens at separate plants outside the mining program's jurisdiction.

Nationally, more than 95 percent of mined phosphate rock goes into wet-process and superphosphoric acid, the feedstock for ammonium phosphate fertilizers and animal feed supplements, and about a quarter of that acid leaves the country as fertilizer products such as diammonium and monoammonium phosphate (USGS 2026). In Florida, private phosphatic fertilizer manufacturers employed 2,497 people at 20 establishments in 2025, averaging $109,639 a year (BLS QCEW 2025, Florida statewide file).

U.S. phosphate rock output has held near 20 million metric tons a year, and the USGS ties that plateau to Florida producers working with declining reserves and lower grade ore.

Marketable production was an estimated 21.6 million tons in 2021, 19.4 million in 2024 and an estimated 20 million in 2025, valued at $1.9 billion at the mine (USGS Mineral Commodity Summaries 2026). The USGS says Florida producers contend with decreasing reserves and lower phosphorus pentoxide content, and that imports, more than 99 percent from Peru from 2021 to 2024, rose over the same period, reaching an estimated 3.4 million tons in 2025.

Across the four producing states, Florida among them, the USGS estimates about 1,900 people worked at U.S. phosphate mines and beneficiation plants in 2025, down from 2,000 in 2024 (USGS 2026). Phosphate rock was added to the final 2025 U.S. List of Critical Minerals, published November 7, 2025, after public comment and interagency input on the draft list (USGS Mineral Commodity Summaries 2026).

Yes for any Florida land mined after July 1, 1975; land mined before that date had no reclamation requirement and is called nonmandatory land.

The Legislature requires reclamation of all land mined for phosphate after July 1, 1975, and operators must file a conceptual reclamation plan with FDEP (FDEP Phosphate page). Standards cover safe slopes, water quality and quantity, revegetation, and returning wetlands to their pre-mining type, nature, function and acreage, under Part II of Chapter 378, Florida Statutes, and Chapter 62C-16 of the Florida Administrative Code. Older pre-1975 land was handled through the Nonmandatory Land Reclamation Program, which funded reclamation of eligible sites.

Permits depend on dates as well. A mine not covered by a conceptual reclamation plan filed before July 1, 1996, needs an Environmental Resource Permit, and grandfathered mines still need a Wetland Resource Permit for dredging or filling in wetlands or other surface waters unless the activity is specifically exempted (FDEP Phosphate page). The fertilizer plants fall under a separate FDEP Phosphate Management Program, which regulates the design, operation and closure of phosphogypsum stack systems, the wastewater systems at plants that process ore into fertilizer, and requires owners to prove they can pay for closure and long-term care (FDEP Phosphate Management Program).

Florida levies a severance tax of $1.61 per ton of phosphate rock severed, and 25.5 percent of the proceeds go to the State Park Trust Fund.

The rate in section 211.3103, Florida Statutes, applies to bone-dry tons at the point of severance; from January 1, 2015, to December 31, 2022, the rate was $1.80 (Section 211.3103, F.S.). Since January 1, 2023, the proceeds are split as follows.

The statute limits the producing counties' share to phosphate-related expenses, and lets the Legislature route the rural county share to a local economic development authority created by special act (Section 211.3103, F.S.).

Last verified: October 18, 2026, by re-reading the FDEP phosphate mining and phosphate management pages, the SWFWMD Peace River history page, the February 2026 USGS phosphate rock summary, section 211.3103 of the 2026 Florida Statutes and the BLS 2025 Florida wage file.